Creating PDF Documents
[Updated April 21, 2009]
Ever need to send via email a document to someone or to a large number of people? Can everyone read the same documents that you create in Microsoft Word, or Wordperfect, or Open Office? Probably not. The solution is to send PDFs instead.
The PDF (Portable Document Format) was created with the goal of making it possible to create a document that can be read by anyone who has installed a free PDF reader such as Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. (See Wikipedia for more options.)
PDFCreator and BullZip are two such applications that will produce documents in the PDF format. You create your document using any software that can print (Microsoft Word, Open Office, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Excel). Then you simply “print” to BullZip or PDFCreator (they will show up as one of your printers). After you start the print process, a window will come up with fields where you can give the document a title and indicate where on your computer to save the PDF file that will be produced.
With PDFCreator, at the bottom of the window are five buttons. If you select the “Wait-collect” button, PDFCreator will collect the pages that you are currently printing. You can then print other pages from the same or different applications. Once you have collected all the pages that you want in that PDF document, press the “Save” button. You will then see another window where you can select the directory and give the newly created file a name.
BullZip works in a similar fashion but has other features. I have them both installed, but find myself using BullZip more often these days.
You can download and use both BullZip and PDFCreator for free. There are other options as well. OpenOffice is freeware that competes with Microsoft Office and has PDF functionality built in.